About the Book

Practicing Persuasive Written and Oral Advocacy: Case File I is an engaging resource book for teaching written and oral advocacy in various instructional formats in law school. It contains realistic litigation documents that raise a manageable number of factual and legal issues of different degrees of complexity and sophistication.

Coburn v. Martinez, the fictitious case on which Case File I is based, tells the story of a former psychotherapy patient's effort to prevent dissemination of audio tape recordings of her confidential psychotherapy sessions. The backdrop against which this story unfolds is a police officer's fatal shooting of an unarmed prisoner. The medium of the threatened dissemination is the Internet, which raises cutting-edge legal issues and lends a rich and contemporary context. Students find the story quite interesting—indeed, those who are not too jaded describe it as "gripping."